photo credit: simon_redwood

What are you shaking up in your world today? And what might you learn if you were to stop shaking the globe?

The snow settles and what is meant to be seen is revealed.

— ZenDotStudio

I concluded, after writing Clutter Mutterings, that clutter is mucking up more than my hearth and home. It’s also mucking up my psyche.  And, every so often, looking for inspiration, I dip into my library looking for a cozy revisit of favorite passages.  For the last couple of days I’ve been revisiting Embracing Uncertainty by Susan Jeffers, PhD.  Jeffers comments that:

…mess in our closets, on our desks, in our kitchens, is very disorienting at times, and mess in our minds is perhaps the biggest mess of all! …our decision-making is muddled and, worst of all, we are not experiencing joy in our lives.

Her comments ring true with me – but what to do about it?  Well, Jeffers’ book is a gold mine of nifty exercises and I think her “Settling Mind Exercise” will be just the ticket.  As a child, Jeffers’ father entertained her with snow globes… and she likens settling our minds with watching and waiting while the snow settles inside the snow dome…

…little by little the specks float to the bottom until the glass ball is clear… totally empty. …I imagined myself having an empty glass head.  …The Settling Mind is making room for new sights, ideas, and emotions to come through.  The Clear Mind is ready to embrace the now.

Although I tried this with a real snow globe, I don’t actually have to have one in hand to do the exercise.  My imagination, concentration and focus are enough.  Settling and clearing my mind is a practice I want to do more of… I think of it as an easy meditation that will help me get quiet and aware of the goodness that is just waiting to be seen.

Shake It Up Baby!

ZenDotStudio, a blog that focuses on Zen simplicity, also likens our mental distractions to a snow globe:

…it is so habitual for us to be stirring things up… It’s hard to stop shaking that globe. We just grasp it as hard as we can and shake and shake.  Our wanting to make things happen, to have things go our way, our sense that we are in control; these are the things that cause us to grab that lovely clear snow globe and shake the dickens out of it. We think all the shaking will make the snow land in just the loveliest little drifts that will please us, but in reality life doesn’t work this way. Yes our actions have consequences, but we are not privy to all the things that go into creating the results.

Yeah, that sounds like me and my clutter mutterings – a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on…  And while I’m not clear yet on what-all it is that’s cluttering up my mind, I am convinced I want to give myself the gift of settling and clearing away the clutter inside and out.

With that in mind and with this being the season of gift giving, I’ll contemplate this lovely quote as I close this post:

The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value.

— Charles Dudley Warner

What are you shaking up in your world today? And what might you learn if you were to stop shaking the globe?